Nearly fifty years after his death, Hồ Chí Minh is a still a strong presence in Vietnam.
Cindy’s wanted to do the “Hike, Bike, and Kayak in Vietnam” Sierra Club trip since she heard about it four years ago. It’s fifteen days in northern Vietnam from the big city of Hanoi, to the mountains of Sa Pa and the water of Ha Long Bay.
We arrived in Hanoi on October 19, On the way to our hotel, we had our first taste of Hanoi traffic.
Cars ride the center lane, every other inch of space is used by the beeping mopeds.
Hanoi is over a thousand years old, and has an estimated 7.7 million people in the municipal area, with about 3.5 million in the metro area, it’s dense with people, shops and mopeds!
We stayed in the Old Quarter whose narrow streets are lined with small stores, each street traditionally sold one type of merchandise, if you want banners there’s a street for that, if you need housewares, that’s on another street.
Old Quarter shop specializing in banners.Another old Quarter shop specializes in housewares.The power and communications wires are an engineer’s nightmare.Architectural remnants of the French occupation of Vietnam are everywhere in Hanoi.
From Hanoi we traveled to Sa Pa, a resort town in the mountains. The highlight was a bike ride starting at top of the highest pass in Viet Nam, Tram Tom Pass. It was a down hill coast for ten miles! Then a ride through the countryside to the small working-class town of Tam Duong where we were the only Westerners.
Getting ready for our ten-mile high-speed downhill coast.We visited the local market in Tam Duong to get stuff for our dinner
We rode through rice fields.Cindy got a chance to meet the kids at a school that was on our bike route.Everywhere on our route, rice was put out in the sun to dry.
Most of our travel was by chartered bus, but one night we took the overnight train back to Hanoi, our sleeper berths had four bunks each. The tour leader later asked if we’d have been open to having two overnight trains on the trip, we all agreed that once was enough.
Cindy navigates the sleeper car aisle.
We then traveled to the Halong Bay area. Halong Bay, is a UNESCO World Heritage site. The bay, part of the Gulf of Tonkin, is filled with limestone karsts, giving an otherworldly look to the bay.
We did a lot of kayaking in the Halong bays.Sunrise in the bay.We stayed on this classic Halong Bay yacht a couple nights.Our Sierra Club travel pals and guides.
To wrap things up we returned to Hanoi for a final night before the group either headed home or on to other places. Cindy and I, along with my sister Janet and friend Mary Ann who toured Vietnam with the Sierra Club group, went to Siem Reap Cambodia to tour the temples at Angkor Wat. (I’ll write about that later.)
We visited the Everglades from every angle – the west side Gulf Coast Visitor Center and its Thousand Islands and marshes, the upper east with the fantastic Shark Valley plains and the lower east’s Flamingo Visitor Center and hurricane-ravaged bays.
Leaving the Everglades behind, we tangled with the vast urban-osity of Miami/Fort Lauderdale.
Someone said that this area is getting 10,000 new residents regularly and I guess they all brought at least two cars, but somehow they left their rules of the road book where they came from.
U-turn? There’s no notice necessary for that!
In the turn lane? Why waste your blinker, everybody knows what happening.
Red light at night? If no one’s crossing my path, why stop?
So we tolerate it because once you hit the beach all is forgiven!
They’re just fantastic!!! One evening we visited the Hollywood Broadwalk just after a huge rainstorm, Bars were drying the seats, a rainbow hovered over the Atlantic, and everybody was out strolling again. A bar buddy at Bunny & Reads Toucan Hideway hearing we were hungry, told us about the Taco Beach Shack close by. We went, It was Two for Tuesday Tacos, and with cool guy Martini and a drummer performing.
Hollywood Beach after a rainstorm.Martini “Hit me up on Instagram” performing at the Taco Beach Shack.
The day before we visited Miami and Haulover Beach with its sweet warm water and hot sun, plus the deco hotels of South Beach. Next, delicious lunch and great conversation with our Uruguay waiter at a stainless steel diner.
Stainless steel diner in Miami’s South BeachMiami deco hotel
And then there’s Ft Lauderdale… we walked by the Elbo Room Bar seen in Connie Stevens’ first movie Where The Boys Are, and took the fantastic Carrie B sightseeing cruise through Ft. Lauderdale’s canals, gawking at gazillionaires houses and boats.
Rich person’s house on the canal in Ft. Lauderdale.On the Carrie B we got chased by a thunderstorm front, disembarking just before the rain dumped big time.Apparently you haven’t really made it unless your yacht is more than 300 feet long.
OK, maybe the city planners won’t program traffic lights to allow cars to actually move a while here, or haven’t realized that traffic circles don’t need stop lights. But wow they do have the beaches down!
Who would have thought that there’s a place to camp with our trailer only 15 miles from New Orleans’s Bourbon Street? Bayou Segnette State Park is across the Mississippi River from New Orleans. From there, we found the best way to get to the French Quarter was to catch the ferry in Algiers and cross the Mississippi on it. It drops you right off at Canal Street and costs $2 (bring exact change).
As soon as we got off the ferry we saw a Mardi Gras parade, huge floats riding past, beads and other stuff getting thrown off to the crowd (no flashing required).
In the French Quarter, our first stop was Tommy O’Hara’s for Hurricanes, then course we had to stop at Café Du Monde for beneigts.
Cindy and her favorite New Orleans t-shirt.
The night parades are fantastic with lit-up floats and burning torches.
People reserve their parade space with ladders topped with seats.
And then there’s the costumes, families, marching groups, random inebriated folk, they’re everywhere.
Bourbon street madness
Finally if you forgot to bring a costume, the body-painting shop has you covered!
Cindy figured out that we could get to Florida via Memphis, TN, Jackson, MS and New Orleans, LA (in time for Mardi Gras, but that’s another story), so we traveled I-57 south rather than the route through Indiana that Chicagoans typically use.
In Memphis, we toured the National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Motel, which incorporates the Lorraine Motel where Dr. Martin Luther King was assinated as well as the rooming house across the street where the assassin waited. The museum’s exhibits start with stark fact that “When the founding fathers signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776, some 539,000 people – 20 percent of the new nation – were held in bondage.”
The timeline of the civil rights struggle from that time through Dr. King’s last hours, and the assassin’s lair across the street is shocking.
“Georgia and many other states celebrated the source of their prosperity by issuing bank notes that showed African American slaves at work.”“In the 1760s, one enslaved laborer was expected to produce 200 pounds of sugar per year…”The view the assassin saw of the Lorraine Motel balcony, the spot where Dr. King was shot is marked with a wreath.
In Jackson, MS we toured the home of Medgar Evers, the slain NAACP leader who was assinated in his driveway in June 1963. Ms. Minnie Watson hosted us at the modest family ranch and spoke eloquently of Medgar Evers’ work, and the legacy his assassination had on his family and the country. Despite making no effort at all to cover his crime, his assassin was acquitted of the murder by all-white juries in two trials, and was not brought to justice for more than thirty years.
The Evers family home.Ms. Minnie Watson in the carport of the Evers family home where the shooting took place.The Evers family kept their beds on the floor to provide some safety from shootings directed at the home.A bullet hole remains in the wall of the Evers home.
Also in Jackson, MS we visited the new Mississippi Civil Rights Museum. Its narrative is similar to the National Civil Rights Museum.
Systematic programs in Mississippi to decrease black voting rights led to a drop of black registered voters from 66.9% in 1867 to 4.3% in 1955.
Outside of New Orleans the reality of slavery really hits you on a tour of the Whitney Plantation. It’s the only plantation tour seen from the viewpoint of the slaves who were captive there and is based on the Slave Narratives recorded by Works Progress Administration writers in the depression. Slave Narratives was a program to record oral histories from people who were slaves, since this work was done in the 1930s, the people interviewed were children when they were enslaved.
Whitney Plantation was a sugar plantation, sugar cane is perishable, when it was ready for harvest slaves were forced to work from first light to last. Our guide comparing cotton plantations to sugar plantations said, “Cotton will break you, but cane will kill you. The life expectancy of a sugar field worker was ten years.”
Haunting sculptures are placed throughout the Whitney Plantation, this child is on the porch of a typical slave dwelling.Slave dwelling interiorDuring the time of slavery, the big house windows were barred for security
Whitney Plantation was a sugar plantation; large kettles were used to boil the sugar cane mash into sugar. Slaves were forced to do the hazardous work of ladling hot mash from kettle to kettle.
Venice is unlike anything we’ve ever seen. No cars anywhere, and boats everywhere. The Grand Canal feeds lots of “rivers” that go into the neighborhoods.
Their public transportation system is the vaporetto boats, so to get somewhere we’re crammed in usually with lots of people (during the day, it’s less crowded at night) while gondolas, water taxis and motorboats with goods are all zipping around. Then you get off and walk the maze of pedestrian lanes that vary from 15 to 6 feet wide. But you still feel the water below you from the rolling vaporetto. Most walking trips include a vaporetto ride just to get across the Grand Canal since there are only 3 bridges across it.
Approaching a vaporetto stop, on the right, along the grand canal.We’re probably the only people who’d get excited about seeing kayakers in Venice!This is getting to be a thing, we saw Bradonia in New Zealand, a bar in Volterra with double d chandeliers and Venice’s Bacaro Jazz Bar is similarly decorated.In keeping with the high rent theme…a Big Mac is 8.10 euros ($9.50).Bacari” bars away from touristy areas offer inexpensive drinks and finger food in the early evening. Wine’s 2-3 euros and a “cicchetti” toothpick munchie is 1 euro or so. They attract crowds of pub crawling young locals who don’t have to worry about driving home.
A freebie at Piazza San Marco are the dueling bands at several restaurants. Four piece combos are set up on the piazza, a seat at a table comes with a 6 euro band charge, but standing and swaying to the music is gratis
And now the answer you’re waiting for!
The ice cream was 19.50 euros (about $23.00) no kidding. But we had it at Caffe Florian which has been a Venetian institution since 1720, it’s totally beautiful, and a band plays outside as you eat.
Cinque is Italian for the number five.
And, there’s a group of five towns in Italy that are known as the Cinque Terre. We had a three night visit planned there.
The five Cinque Terre towns are nestled in the Ligurian Sea coast.
We arrived in the Cinque Terre town Monterosso and did all the touristy things; take a ferry ride between towns, walk each town (which ain’t easy cause these towns are built on steep cliffs), watch the rock divers, eat gelato, dine on catch-of-the-day fish, etc. etc.
Ferry boats connect the towns, serving up postcard views at each stopThe Ligurian Sea seems be pretty warm, we haven’t dipped a toe yet, but others have.
Leaving Cinque Terre we headed to Lucca, the birthplace of Puccini, for opera, an easy bike ride on the towns medieval wall and everything else Rick Steve’s Italy guidebook told us to do.
Highlight of Lucca was a opera recital at the Church of Santi Giovanni e Reparata, it was a lovely hour of Puccini and Verdi selections.
Bike riding on Lucca’s two and a half mile wall.
After that we had a five night open spot in our calendar, aka being homeless. Talking about what to do for the next five nights, we figured we could go to a couple more towns maybe Genoa or Turin for sightseeing with the attendant train rides, schedules and decisions, or…
Maybe just relax and do NOTHING!
The perfect place to do that?
The exquisite Cinque Terre for five more nights!
We’ve found a great place to stay with a water and sunset view from the patio, and a bright cozy bedroom, this’ll be perfect.
We first heard a variation of this phrase when we were booking a rafting trip in New Zealand and it seems appropriate to reuse it for our few days in Naples, Italy.
To quote from “Rick Steves Italy 2017” “Naples is Italy in the extreme” it’s Italy’s third largest city and the densest city in Europe with over a million people in a tight area.
Crime scene(s) illustration.
Our arrival in Naples was greeted by a pickpocket who had his fingers in Cindy’s backpack within a few blocks of the train station. I’d turned to see if she was behind me and saw him tight to her back. He saw me see him and quickly heeled around and scurried away. I yelled to Cindy “Check your stuff right now.” She turned to look and the pack was open, her small purse dangling open. The only thing that had been in there was a single credit card. We called and cancelled it immediately and made our way to the Airbnb.
The not-much-wider-than-a-tiny-car cobblestone streets are hemmed in on each side by five-story apartment buildings, we walked with gobs of people who seem to live a good part of their life in on those streets.
Tiny cafes, al fresco dining, and mid block bar/cafes are everywhere and all day until past midnight everyone is out walking, drinking, eating and talking. This city is alive! Out host is a longtime Naples resident and she said sometimes it takes an hour to walk a block after greeting, chatting, and coffee-ing with the neighbors.
Naples street life.Of course one of our top Naples sights was a delicious Neapolitan pizza stuffed with ham, ricotta and salami from Lombardi 1892, at Via Foria 12, Cindy had gnocchi.
Naples was our base for Pompeii which is easily reached for a bargain 1.20 euros ($1.35) via the “Circumvesuviana” train line.
Pompeii street, that’s Mt. Vesuvius through the arch.
After Pompeii we visited the Museo Archeologico archaeological museum where the frescos from Pompeii reside.
After Pompeii we visited the Museo Archeologico archaeological museum where the frescos from Pompeii reside.This is from the “Secret Room” at the Museo Archeologico, I’m thinking it’d make a great art fair craft item.
Later back at our room we heard a commotion outside, peeked out and saw the street was barricaded for several buildings next to us. Apparently a small pink suitcase in the street was reported as a possible bomb threat. I heard a loud bang. The plastic pink pack was shot by a bomb robot, our host shared her pic of the action with us…
Pink suitcase getting plugged.
Our two intense days in Naples at an end, we walked in a downpour to the train station. Greeting us there was another of the pickpocket gang, as I turned to check on Cindy a block from the station I saw him shadowing her, his hands at her pack. I yelled at “YO” at him, he removed his hands from her empty purse, raised them to show they’re empty and scurried off.
After all this, Cindy’s the “keen” on Naples, loving the vitality and game of the streets, Art’s the “not so much”.
Riverside RV White Water Retro trailer bumper failure from using a bike rack. (right view)Here’s the whole load that caused the trailer bumper to fail. Hanging on the bumper are two full size bikes, a bike rack, and the trailer’s spare tire and mount.
The manufacturer doesn’t recommend adding a bike rack to the 4” square bumper on our Retro trailer. But we decided to chance it.
Riverside RV White Water Retro trailer bumper failure from using a bike rack.
I added a CURT 19100 RV Bumper Hitch to the trailer’s bumper, slid our Yakima bike rack into it, and added two full size bikes.
We did fine on a 3,687 mile trip from Chicago to the Badlands and back. We didn’t do so fine on our second big trip to Arizona. About 900 miles into the trip, in Dallas, TX we stopped for gas, and I did a walk around of the car and trailer to see if everything was OK. It wasn’t.
Riverside RV White Water Retro trailer bumper failure from using a bike rack. (left view)
I found the bumper torn at the mounts to the trailer frame and our bikes and spare tire leaning toward the pavement. (These photos recreated it in our driveway when we got home.)
Luckily nothing fell off. We were able to absorb the bikes, spare tires and racks into the trailer and car, and the trip proceeded.
Back home, we had the bumper replaced by our Riverside RV dealer and things are back to normal with the trailer.
We pulled out of our driveway in our red Retro trailer Sunday morning, September 18, 2016 heading for South Dakota’s Badlands and Rocky Mountain National Park. We planned on driving 200-300 miles on travel days and then stay in the best places like the Badlands and Rocky Mountain National Park for several since we had four weeks planned for this trip.
Our first stop was Madison, Wisconsin, 136 miles from our driveway. After that we’d only have 700 miles to go to reach the Badlands in South Dakota.
The three things we wanted to do in his trip were check out bike trails, hike and shoot photos. Madison fit in with its good bike trail system.
From our camp at Lake Farm County Park in Madison, Wisconsin we could get on the Capitol City Trail for an easy ride to the statehouse, the University of Wisconsin and downtown Madison.
From Madison we made our way west through Wisconsin, Minnesota and South Dakota.
A stop at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesien in Wisconsin. Wright grew up in the area and once he had some money he built a compound where he often stayed. Like many of Wright’s buildings, keeping Taliesien from crumbling is a constant project.Cindy contemplating Frank.We stayed one night at Goose Island County Park in LaCrosse, Wisconsin on the backwaters of the Mississippi River. Heavy rains gave many in the campground riverside views.
In South Dakota we stayed in the town of Mitchell, home to the “World’s Only Corn Palace”. I thought it’d be a rickety building with some murals made out of corn on the outside, but actually it’s a frequently used modern event and exhibition space. The exterior corn murals are changed yearly, probably because the pigeons are hard at work pecking out kernels, but the interior ones are permanent.
There was a Pedal Tractor Pull going on in the Corn Palace the day we were there, kids from many states competed to pedal a weighted pedal tractor the farthest.Outside the Corn Palace, the local Outcast Car Club was having their annual car show. One participant told us there are more gear heads in Mitchell than anywhere else in South Dakota.The Outcast Car Club was having a dance that evening, so we joined in and danced to the great cover band Something New.At the Chamberlain Rest Stop on I-80 in South Dakota, a 50-foot impressive Indian sculpture “Dignity” by Iowa artist Dale Lamphere was unveiled just 10 days before we passed through.
We finally arrived at the Badlands after 7 days touring. The temperature was in low 80s days / 40s at night. The Badlands are surreal, the towering spires eroded out of what was a lake bed some 75 – 35 million years ago. The 40 mile Badlands Loop Road goes right through them, many people drive through making a stop here and there to see a vista or the prairie dog village and then go on their way like the pioneers did, assessing the area as unproductive and a “Badlands”.
I was interested in seeing how light played across the Badlands landscape, so we were out before sunrise and again at sunset shooting photos.
A stop at Wall Drugs for 5 cent coffee and a donut. Why would you eat a donut like this?
We stopped at Devils Tower National Monument in Wyoming for a close encounter. Some trees there are wrapped in prayer cloths.
We made our way to Custer, South Dakota for the 51st annual Buffalo Roundup in Custer State Park. The cow pokes slowly herded hundreds of buffalo into pens. They are inoculated and counted before being released back into the park.
The top photos are what a buffalo roundup looks like through a zoom lens, the last is the reality of craning to get a buffalo view past the other thousands of spectators.
While in Custer, we pulled the bikes down and rode the Michelson Bike Trail. The stretch north out of Custer is stunning, through valleys with mountains in the background. We even had views of Crazy Horse Memorial at one point.
Good thing there was a sign on the The Michelson Bike Trail where viewing the Crazy Horse Memorial is possible.
The Michelson Bike Trail near Custer, South Dakota.
We heard there was a Volksmarch at the Crazy Horse Memorial so we laced up and hiked 6.2 miles through woods & mountains right up to the Crazy Horse memorial with a few thousand others.
Volksmarchers on Crazy Horse’s arm.
We decided to go to Mt. Rushmore for the lighting at 8 pm, it was the second to the last one of the year so our timing was good. The lighting ceremony was quite patriotic and moving. It’s a video with narration about Washington (the nation’s birth), Jefferson (nation building), Lincoln (nation in crisis), and Roosevelt (our nation becomes a world power). Following the video, the mountain faces are lit. The master of ceremonies invited all the veterans in the audience to the stage for a flag lowering ceremony. Each gave his or her rank, name and branch.
We also went back to Mt. Rushmore to see it during the day.Fantastic breakfast at the Waffle Lab on Ft. Collins, Colorado. (Thanks, Nora Cronin, for the recommendation.) The waffles there are made from dough rather than batter, and cooked with Belgian sugar that caramelizes on the outside.
The limit of our westward travel was Estes Park, Colorado. We’d been there before* and revisiting Rocky Mountain National Park was magic.
*(It was June 1972 and I thought Colorado mountains would be warm like Chicago…I shivered in the tent every night.)
This gnarled pine on the Emerald Lake Trail in Rocky Mountain National Park reminded me of a Japanese ink drawing.The Emerald Lake Trail in Rocky Mountain National Park actually highlights three lakes, Nymph Lake, Dream Lake and Emerald Lake.Fall is a great time to see the elk in Rocky Mountain National Park. The bulls are gathering and guarding their harems
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The view from the top of Deer Mountain in Rocky Mountain National Park looks at the town of Estes Park and Lake Estes.
After Rocky Mountain National Park we visited Garden of the Gods in Colorado Springs, Colorado. A most amazing place set right in the heart of a metropolis.
Biking at Garden of the Gods is a challenge, the paved loop is not that long, but grades of up to 15% give you a workout.Sunset at Garden of the Gods.
We pulled back in our driveway in Glen Ellyn, Illinois after 32 days and 3,687 miles in time to watch the third presidential debate of 2016!
